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Is support for capitalism a mental illness?
OK, it's a bit of a deliberately contraversial title, but, please, bear with me.
Is there anything in the realms of anthropology or psychology to suggest that the notion of 'private property' is actually a mental illness? I do wonder, as it really is the most perverse form of super-alienation from humanity imaginable. Natural property is communal, and the attempt to expropriate it as some kind of exclusive personal thing is in my estimation a betrayal of everything that makes us human. So, anyone know of any research on that, something that would go beyond Kropotkin's 'Mutual Aid' and Engels' 'On the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State'?
I am aware of a study that people studying economics progressively show less empathy and solidarity in game-theory tests as they progress through their course (obviously I don't remember where I found this info).
Poking around looking for this stuff I found quite an interesting paper here (it's a pdf) - http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct...JsthdOfDI2BM6g -
that begins "It has been well established that business students often cheat more and act in less cooperative ways than students from other academic fields ..." which is perhaps telling.
Just wondering what insights people have on this: whether it's just me that thinks the notion that 'property' is more important than people could be a mental disorder.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
That's a bit weird, and tends to suggest (on an initial skim of the wiki article) that people who think the social system is unfair are more likely to be bullies.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
I don't know; I think this reduces Marxism too much to the sort of speculative pseudo-Hegelian anthropology we should probably be phasing out. And, I mean, property of some sort was necessary for much of human history - so was the world necessarily mad? It all sounds a bit eschatological to me, not to mention the unfortunate implications of declaring your political opponents to be mentally ill.
Well, yeah, it may be going a little far. But I think it's reasonable to suggest that attachment to property leads to a decrease in empathy. That seems to be established.
Alienation and fetishism are somewhat out of favour in Marxist discourse I think and I don't think they should be. Private property (I'm gonna insist on this) is a form of super-alienation from 'the species-being'.
There's a famous slogan from a placard during the revolution in Russia (Trotsky mentions it) which was 'the right to life is higher than the right to property' which seems to me to be one of the most utterly reasonable and indeed inarguable things anyone has ever written on anything; and yet every day I'm confronted by people saying they'd kill other humans to protect their 'property'.
It seems to me like a particularly prevelant form of sociopathy, where the notion of exclusive property comes to stand for an absence of human solidarity and is invested with a whole bunch of qualities that really should be reserved for our interactions with other people. It's very unhealthy, I think.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
Not really. Psychological "abnormalities" is constructed from the norm.
But
Interestingly enough research suggests that a higher than avarage number of managers has pychopathic and sociopathic tendencies and that the numbers increase when you go op the hierarchical ladder.
So there is that.
Well, yeah. The particular thing that sterted me on this was reading a while back about a study among students and staff at a university into empathy. I can't however remember where I read it which is frustrating.
My recollection is that the results were something like this:
First year economics students tested 'normal' for empathy (compared to non-economics first year students and new non-economics staff), second year economics students tested on average significantly worse for empathy compared to other second year students and non-economics staff that had been there more than a year (both of which groups tested similarly) and third year economics students on average tested massively worse for empathy compared to both the third-year non-economics students and the non-economics staff that had been there more than two years (which groups again had similar results).
Conclusion? Studying economics makes you an asshat. Of course, it could be that it doesn't make you an asshat, it attracts asshats, and you have to be an asshat to pass, therefore years one and two just weed out the non-asshats.
Either way, by the end of your third year of economics statistically you're likely to be much less empathetic than your fellow non-econ students, econ students in lower years, or the support staff at your uni. The most likely explanation seems to be a kind of acquired sociopathy.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
Yeah I have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of pathologizing this, but it's also sort of an interesting discussion and I appreciate the openly provocative title.
Certainly IMO fetishism and the pervasive alienation under capitalism leads to all sorts of dysfunction and confusion among people in all classes - workers and the poor having less room or options to cope with the stresses and demands and isolation.
I read something (I didn't totally buy the argument but it was interesting) about a relationship between serial killers and the tendency of small owners/professionals to over-identify with their profession or the shop they own. One of the main examples used was that John Wayne Gacey was a building contractor (or something similar) who would employ his construction and planning techniques when killing and disposing of bodies (hidden in the foundation of his home and meticulously arranged to maximize space).
I think with the business school sociopahthy arguments it could easily be that these schools foster a culture that just encourages such callousness and competitiveness that anyone bothered by that transfers pretty quickly or drops out. Still it would be interesting if it turned out that the "merit" that allows these yuppies to make it is a lack of common empathy and decency, not cleverness or worth as they tend to believe.
The educational system is there to teach approved knowledge and patterns of thinking and to breed conformity to hierarchical structures. The same goes for companies which simply demand it.
This is an over simplification.
But what you state about the study of economics also counts for, for example, psychology. In that field the societal norm is the standard and everybody that deviates from the norm is labelled and classified. When I studied psychology back in 1996 the term for the study of mental and psychological issues was named: abnormal psychology. So that alone says alot about the mentality.
I think there's definitely empirical support for the idea that successful capitalists are disproportionately sociopathic. But I don't think simply supporting capitalism is an illness. It's more to do with limited horizons I think.
The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!
- Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
I'm not going to claim that the be-all-and-end-all of my 'thesis' is that 'anyone who refuses to condemn capitalism utterly and at once is a psychopath'.
I really mean the sort of people who aggresively promote capitalism - the people who really identify with it, claim that it's an eternal part of human behaviour and that it has universally-applicable principles, etc. Seems to me that that's some serious mystification going on. I was on facebook arguing with one earlier who claimed that it was quite reasonable to kill someone who walked across 'his' lawn. That's beyond fucked-up, it really is.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
I can agree with saying the people who "aggressively promote capitalism" may possibly be sociopathic or have a 'mental illness', but there are many other reasons as to why one may aggressively promote capitalism. For their own bourgeois security, for the sake of their political power, etc. Not that its overencompassing, but I don't think that people who aggressively promote capitalism and say it is human behavior and universally applicable are not necessarily mentally ill, but possibly because they were raised that way and under a different belief system. Like cannibalistic tribes in obscure parts of the world. It's bad that they are cannibalistic but they don't really know any better, so its not really a "mental illness"... But it COULD be, for certain members in that society..
Okay, yeah. Prizing your front lawn over another human's life is pretty pathological.
The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!
- Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
apparently "stockholm syndrome" has been debunked as a real mental affliction, so i guess not [/snark]
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least We shall be free
Anecdotally (the best kind of evidence, obviously) students of economics or politics, normally at least reasonably critically thinking individuals, tend to internalise all aspects of politics that we would perceive as pro-capitalist. Recently I heard that corruption is not technically a bad thing, as it means business interests are furthered which means that trickle-down economics will bring the workers benefits. Doublethink is bandied about a lot, but I think these people utilize it masterfully when they need to. If the system is seen to work for them even slightly, then it must mean that others are not playing the game correctly. Empathy is siphoned out absolutely of these people, who are privileged, or more often than not interested in studying politics or economics because the system worked so well for their parents or peers that it must have some merit.
"He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many."
Formerly known as Pragmatic-Punk / Right Hand Of Jah / Heinous Bifter
I think it's even more simple than has been posited here.
Neoclassical economic theory's main assumption is that the driver of human needs and wants, tastes and desires, is human nature itself, and that needs and wants, tastes and desires, themselves drive supply, demand and price fluctuations within the economy. In other words, neoclassical economists - who are the intellectual godfathers of contemporary capitalist "science" see human nature as the root of all economic activity.
They do not see that human nature can be altered in any way - not by economic outcomes, not by macro-economic factors nor by the structure of society nor its institutional make-up.
Neoclassical economics is based on a mono-causal theory of the economy (causality running from human nature, in the form of unchangeable human needs/wants/preferences/tastes/desires, to economic outcomes) and it is mono-causal for a reason: in essence, once you start theorising according to multi-causal explanations of the economy, or more importantly multi-causal explanations with multi-directional causality (i.e. human needs/wants/tastes/desires are endogenous to a variety of real, measurable economic variables), then much of neoclassical theory's policy prescriptions - particularly those that stress anti-interventionism in the economy - start to break down.
No it isn't.
At one time (and I honestly don't think anyone can disagree here) hierarchy, not as we see it today but a very similar form of it, was NEEDED for our evolution as humans. The tribal effect and dog eat dog effect is what made us what we are today. If you look at how humans evolved to what we are now it wasn't pretty at all. There was murder on an even larger scale than today - prehistoric man would engage in rape and kill of other prehistoric mans children by smashing their skulls in to ensure only their gene pool would remain. The strongest had to surivive and when food was scarce lifes would be lost in a competitive environment.
Today we're obviously much more evolved than that. Rape is of course still a problem in many socieites but compared to prehistoric times we've evolved enough to come up with moral structures. We no longer need to ensure that the strongest live whilst the weakest die off because we're capable of looking after everyone and we aren't the apes we once were.
But because hierarchy was needed and it was indeed a way in which humans evolved it meant that we've been left with those at the top and those underneath ever since.
As technology, medicine, science and political thinking have developed so have thoughts on different forms of running a society i.e. leftism. But it's one of those things that's difficult to shake off. Trying to convince an entire species to change the way they've acted for millions of years is obviously no easy task.
As well as that at school, and indeed at home, you're told how the world is from a very easy age. The kind of thing I often hear children is "life isn't fair" when ever they complain about something. From the moment you can talk you're being told, at the key ages in personal development, how the world is.
It becomes difficult to see past capitalism. Heck, many, many people today don't even know what capitalism is. They see it as just being how the world works and get on with it.
Capitalists have developed a very clever educational system and media to ensure that people believe it's just how the world works too, and that it's the only option. I myself wouldn't have become a leftist had I not been told to take up A level sociology. In fact I was a UKIP supporter before that and had almost no idea of leftist politics. To me the left was the modern day Labour Party in the UK.
I'd try to avoid refereeing to capitalist as having a 'mental illness' they're merley victims of a clever ideological state apparatus which has existed for a very, very long time. It would be easy for them to turn it around and say that we're the ones with mental illnesses as we are 'utopian' and are in the vast minority.
The drip-drip of bourgeois economics incrementally strips individuals of their humanity as it debases them and makes them fit to serve their true master: Satan
Psychology students in the UK still study modules called abnormal psychology. And they love it. But they would never stoop so low as to take economics classes.
Btw, alienation isn't a mental illness, it's a social relation. Private property is the cause of alienation not its symptom.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Well this crude evolutionary theory you've got going on is just bollocks. Where is the evidence that prehistoric man did this as a matter of course? Actually, the Romans, one of the most civilised societies of the ancient world, were more likely to behave in the manner you suggest - and mainly due to the institution of private property and inheritance, not some biological urge to preserve their gene pool.
And how do you explain the fact that modern society is way more hierarchical than simple hunter-gatherer communities?
How do explain the action of the civilised Europeans with their science and technology against the indigenous peoples of the world? The genocide of the native Americans? How do explain why the most culturally advanced European nation, Germany, gave birth to the Nazis and the holocaust?
Last edited by Hit The North; 5th February 2014 at 19:32.
"Events have their own logic, even when human beings do not." - Rosa Luxemburg
"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." - Lenin
Its unlikely, being that it has been so socialized that it cannot be purely psychological.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." MLK
-fka Redbrother
